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FCC Favors Net Neutrality
dkatana writes: Yesterday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said net neutrality is high on the agency's agenda, and a set of rules will be proposed beginning of next month. He also talked about reclassification of internet providers such as Google Fiber as Title II Telecom Companies. If Google and other fiber providers are given pole access, it could be the beginning of a race to deploy fiber-to-the-home to many cities and towns, where the cost of digging trenches has deterred many initiatives and protected the monopolies of the entrenched telecom providers. Advocates for net neutrality believe that Title II classification would allow the FCC to protect Internet services by regulating against paid prioritization.
A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.
Today is not 1 April!
Hard to believe what I'm reading here. I was starting to grow cynical.
Anyhow, just wanted to post to say this appears to be a good thing. Very, very exciting.
blog
Indeed. It's not a _related_ article but a OP ED by Grover Norquist. The most most right-wing anti-tax advocate out there, it's hardly an article where a journalist actually performed research on it independently. I'm very interested in understanding any tax consideration that may arise, but I automatically discount anything from the lunatic fringe that have their life agendas at stake.
Okay, currently Google Fiber is $70/month for Gig service.
Now, say it goes up that $67/year that was quoted.
That means it's going to be $76/month (call it $80 just to be outrageous).
So, oh NOEZ! I'm now paying more for service!
When, before, my other options were $125/month for Comcast's 50/10 service and $50/month for 3M/512K DSL?
Oh! The pain! The pain!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well, to be honest, having lived in California the liberal bastion of taxing everything for the benefit of the government and just about nobody else, I would classify the alternative as "Tax everyone into indentured servitude of the state, including grandma and force her out on the streets. She will be eaten by ants anyway, but we won't have pictures".
The reality of liberalism is that they think taxes are a right of government and a good thing, rather than what they really are, a necessary evil.
All taxes are regressive.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This isn't regulating the Internet. It's regulating the people who provide access. There's a huge difference. And tons of Internet businesses and smaller ISPs are very much for this reclassification. The only people against it are the megacorps who seek to lose a lot of control and will no longer be able to extort money from competing content providers.
If it was a truly regulated public utility it might work. Right now the system we have is the worst of both worlds. Take a look at what happened to wireline voice services. POTS is and always has been a tightly regulated product, with requirements for reliability, up-time, and a mandate to serve everyone regardless of how rural or unprofitable it might be to reach them. The result was affordable wireline voice service that's available virtually everywhere in CONUS. Service that is now being killed off by two factors:
1) The emergence of wireless.
2) The emergence of wireline competitors (the cable co) that don't have to meet any of the aforementioned "must serve" or reliability metrics.
Item #2 is the one that gets my goat. The cable companies market their voice product as "phone" service when it's really anything but. It doesn't meet the five nines of reliability that POTS has; they can't even keep it working during power outages. It's not available everywhere. They get to cherry pick profitable markets and swipe the very customers that the ILEC most needs to maintain their infrastructure, all the while delivering a considerably inferior service that leaves many consumers high and dry at the very time they most need reliable communications. Is it any wonder that Verizon and AT&T want out of the landline business so badly? Would you remain in a business with huge legacy costs and regulations that's forced to compete with outfits that have neither?
If you're serious about the "regulated utility" option then what you're really talking about is bringing back Ma Bell. That's the only way it's going to work. You can't have a marketplace where you have one or two regulated utilities that have to operate under onerous rules while more nimble competitors are allowed to swoop in without having to meet any of those same regulations. Google Fiber is a product that makes people around here salivate but they're cherry picking profitable markets one by one and leaving everybody else high and dry. Would you trade the ability to see exciting new upstarts like Google Fiber for a system where we have a regulated Ma Bell that's promised a small but steady profit and no competition?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nor are prices when you have next to no competition such as the current situation with ISPs in most markets.
The peering bandwidth is the issue. They can provide all the last mile bandwidth they want, but if you can't connect to any services outside their network because they want to keep customers using their own services then that isn't really the Internet and we are back to the days of AOL chat rooms and BBNs with (pay) walled off private networks.
The internet has worked just fine without these regulations.
That's the problem. Since the internet first came to us via phone companies (which are under Title II), they treated internet traffic like phone conversations. No shaping, no priority, no throttling, just letting everything through equally. Then last January Comcast won a law suit saying that the FCC can't enforce that on them. So now Comcast is trying to change the internet. Net Neutrality is trying to keep it the way it is. So if you like how the internet worked for us so far, you're going to want Net Neutrality.